Eight reasons why we are in a depression

Tyler Cowen, too, uses the "D" word. Neither of us has yet been tempted to prepend the "great" appellaton.

My reasoning for thinking of this as a depression, rather than a recession: roughly, that we don't understand how to get in or out of it. The recession of the early 1980s was very deep, but we knew pretty much what caused it, and hence how it would end. Even the 1970s slump had an obvious proximate cause in the oil shocks. This kind of perfect financial storm is a rarer bird, and no one has plausibly claimed to have mapped the way out yet.

Here's hoping I'm wrong . . .

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